What If Children Mattered No Matter Where They Lived–and
Died?By Peter Hart

December 18, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- We do not live in a world that treats all life
equally. Not even close. Human beings inevitably feel
certain tragedies more deeply, based on proximity to the
victims, national identity, the circumstances of death and
so on.

It is
not surprising that there has been so much media attention
paid to the horrible massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The
thought of small children being gunned down in a classroom
is shocking and tragic. And the usual suggestions to avoid
"politicizing" a tragedy by talking about public policy
decisions that might prevent future tragedies seem to have
less resonance this time around.

When
we draw comparisons between a particular event and other
similar tragedies, it is not to say that they all matter
equally, but to remind ourselves that we're conditioned to
feel that some matter quite a bit more than others.

When I
heard the news about Newtown, I thought of previous mass
shootings in this country. That is perhaps a natural
reaction.But
then I also thought about the case of Sgt. Robert Bales. He
is accused of massacring 16 Afghan civilians earlier this
year, nine of them children. It is not the only atrocity of
the Afghan War, but the
accounts of the attack are particularly horrifying.
Bales allegedly left his base and entered the villages of
Balandi and Alkozai, near Kandahar. He proceeded to kill the
victims as they slept, and then burned some of their
bodies.

It is
not that U.S. media failed to cover the atrocity. But the
tone of the coverage placed considerable weight on the
damage these deaths would do to the war effort (FAIR Media
Advisory,
3/12/12). Questions were posed like, "Could this
reignite a new anti-American backlash in the unstable
region?" One headline stated, "Killings Threaten Afghan
Mission." USA Today actually had on its
front page, "Patriot Now Stands Accused in Massacre."

Seeing
the atrocity this way prioritizes issues like national
security–and obscures the fact that children were killed in
their sleep, and that the person alleged to have killed them
was a member of our military. This particular incident is,
in some ways, just a more horrifying version of many
other U.S. attacks that killed children in Afghanistan,
or the drone attacks that have killed
hundreds in Pakistan.

It is
understandable, on some level, that these deaths will not
affect most Americans the same way as the deaths in Newtown.
They are deaths in a poor, violent country most of us will
never see.

But
that should not prevent us from asking ourselves–and our
media–why that is, and wondering what our politics
and our culture might look like if media decision-makers
felt that that stories like this deserved more attention.

One
has to imagine that our world would be different if we
treated every tragic death as if it mattered. U.S. media
shy away from imagery that could be considered too explicit
or graphic–especially
when it calls attention to suffering caused or endured by
U.S. forces. As journalist Amy Goodman has said on countless
occasions, if our media showed the brutal consequences of
U.S. warmaking, those policies would change.

Sometimes these discussions can be quite explicit.
Time's Joe Klein's
comment that four-year-olds in Pakistan might have to
die from drone attacks so that four-year-old Americans do
not die in terrorist attacks was a reminder that, for some
people, some lives are practically expendable.

So
what would a healthier media look like? It wouldn't tell us
not to grieve over Newtown. It would tell us that violence
against children is deplorable no matter where it happens,
or who inflicts it–and that there are things we can do to
stop it, both close to home and many miles away.

In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)